DENVER — Last weekend’s Great American Beer Festival — the 27th annual event — was a spectacle: More than 400 brewers gathered in the gigantic Colorado Convention Center and offered samples of thousands of beers.

But the core of the festival took place behind the scenes. In the professionally judged competition before the festival began, panels of judges spent three days choosing gold, silver and bronze medalists in 75 style categories, from light lagers to dark, strong and chewy barley wine-style ales.

As always, California brewers did well, and many medal-winning beers can be found at a good beer store near you. Check out these winners:

Steve Donahue of FireHouse Grill and Brewing, 111 S. Murphy Ave. in Sunnyvale, won a silver medal for his Brown Porter. I tried it at the festival and loved it. It’s a brilliant brown with a roast malt nose and a creamy head of foam. The taste is complex, with a lot of malt sweetness at the end and a bit of finishing hop bitterness.

If you live in the South Bay and haven’t tried Donahue’s beers, get over to the FireHouse. The Brown Porter isn’t on tap right now, and probably won’t be until early next year. Instead, there’s a Robust Porter, which is darker with more chocolate and coffee flavors and higher in alcohol than the prizewinner, Donahue said. He also has on tap Brother Tommy’s Abbey Tripel, an 8.5 percent alcohol, Belgian-style, deep copper, full-bore ale.

Firestone-Walker in Paso Robles raked in the medals, too: gold for Union Jack India Pale Ale and Mission Street Pale Ale, silver for Nectar Pale Ale, Oatmeal Stout and Oaktoberfest. The latter two I’ve not seen in bottles.

I can’t say enough about Union Jack IPA. It’s 7.5 percent alcohol and hugely hoppy, having been dry-hopped twice (that is, fresh hops are added to the beer while it is fermenting). But it has a silky, malty background that balances the hops in fine fashion.

Blind Pig, a 6 percent IPA from Russian River Brewing, Santa Rosa, won silver; it’s now available in bottles. Russian River’s Redemption, a 5 percent, Belgian-style Trappist single (the kind the monks drank for lunch), won gold. It’s on tap at the brew pub and can sometimes be found in bottles at good beer stores.

On a sobering topic: The economic situation has been going from dismal to dire, and I wondered how craft beer — that’s my code word for the “good stuff” — is faring in these tougher times. The word from Brewers Association director Paul Gatza is that craft beer sales are still growing, but not as rapidly as last year. Estimated growth in the year to date is 6.5 percent, Gatza said; last year, sales rose more than 11 percent.

But consider that total beer sales — including big guys Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors — are up just four-tenths of 1 percent. Imported beer, meanwhile, has dropped 2.9 percent, the first import sales drop in 17 years, Gatza said; wine sales were up half of 1 percent and distilled spirits were up 1.8 percent.

Craft beer, on average, costs much more than your standard light lager. If things get tough, are people still going to shell out $10 a sixer? Charlie Papazian, founder of the Brewers Association, believes we’ll keep drinking good beer. People aren’t trading down, he said. Craft beer is still going to be an affordable luxury, Papazian added, saying that a six-pack will still be a bargain compared with a $30 bottle of wine.

I’ll drink to that.

On the calendar: Pacific Coast Brewing, 906 Washington St. in downtown Oakland, is celebrating the brew pub’s 20th anniversary Friday and Saturday, with live music and prices rolled back to 1988. More on my blog, www.ibabuzz.com/beer.

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.